TransPerfect Wins Sweeping Court Victory

07/15/2013

By Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Law360

Law360, New York (July 15, 2013, 6:03 PM ET) -- A California federal jury found Friday that website translator MotionPoint Corp. infringed a patent held by rival TransPerfect Global Inc., and held MotionPoint liable for more than $1 million in damages.

TransPerfect sued MotionPoint in 2010, seeking a declaratory judgment that it had not infringed several MotionPoint patents relating to the translation of content from one website to another, and also that MotionPoint's patents for similar technology were invalid.

The jury Friday found MotionPoint had infringed TransPerfect's U.S. Patent Number 6,857,022, and that TransPerfect had not infringed MotionPoint's U.S. Patent Numbers 7,580,960; 7,627,479; and 7,627,817. It also invalidated MotionPoint's patents.

“I'm thrilled that jury was able to see what TransPerfect's been saying since the beginning of this case, which is that MotionPoint's patents came years too late and were an attempt to corner the market that had already seen the same thing in earlier products and publications,” TransPerfect's attorney Douglas E. Lumish of Latham & Watkins LLP said.

Lumish said the '022 patent relates to what's called proxy based website translation, where a company like TransPerfect or MotionPoint translates a website into another language. The translator will take the data from the English website, convert it to Spanish using human linguists, and then provide another website for the second language.

TransPerfect's patent also involves the technology to put a link on the Web page directing a person to the second language site. It also covers the process of pretranslating pages that are linked to the front page.